July 19th, 2023
Bravo, Stanford Daily.

They’ve been hammering away at the research misconduct at some of the president’s neuroscience labs, and he has been as high-handed and obnoxious with the little buggers as you’d imagine. But the school journalists were right on the money. They persisted, and they brought the dude down. The school’s investigation found “repeated instances of manipulation of research data and/or subpar scientific practices from different people and in labs run by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at different institutions.”

[Stanford’s] investigation [of Marc Tessier-Lavigne] took eight months, with one member stepping off after The Daily revealed that he maintained an $18 million investment in a biotech company Tessier-Lavigne cofounded. Reporting by The Daily this week shows that some witnesses to an alleged incident of fraud during Tessier-Lavigne’s time at the biotechnology company Genentech refused to cooperate because investigators would not guarantee them anonymity, even though they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

Of course some sleuthing would turn up a financial conflict of interest on the committee: that’s SOOOO Stanford. And as to the skeeziness on protecting the identity of sources — why wouldn’t the committee guarantee anonymity, given the Genentech people’s legal vulnerability?

Much of the writing and reporting for the Daily has come from the genetically overdetermined Theo Baker.

This page has links to Baker’s reporting on Tessier-Lavigne.

**********************

A comment in response to an article in the NYT:

In three successive labs headed by this man, data was manipulated (ie, fraudulent). The connecting link is Lavigne, who apparently rewarded post-docs who produced findings that advanced his career, and penalized those who couldn’t do so. The obvious conclusion is that he consistently cut corners and closed his eyes to what his behavior led underlings to do. And when the misconduct began to surface, he simply refused to issue the necessary corrections. He is not a victim or some innocent party here. His research was shabby and he has now got what he deserves: loss of his primary job and his reputation.

February 27th, 2023
Take the money and run…

… to your famiglia back in Brescia and have them buy molto luxury cars with Euro Parliament money — that (or this) is how growing numbers of Italian MEPs do the EU thing. Theft by theft, or theft by bribery: This is how we make modern Europe a better place.

Details in this case are fun. Her, uh, cooperating sisters and her cousins and her aunts back in Brescia

misrepresented their qualifications, having declared educational and professional skills that they did not have.

Che scioccante!

So this is what ol’ UD figures is afoot: The large and widening Qatargate scandal means a whole bunch of MEPs are desperately bargaining to stay out of jail. Best way out is to rat on the large MEP famiglia which is the Italian contingent in that body. Italy is so corrupt that already-fingered corrupt Italian MEPs have plenty of not-yet-fingered corrupt Italian MEPs to give up to the authorities in exchange for better treatment.

I.E. – Hold onto your hat; c’è di più da dove viene.

December 18th, 2022
‘A Belgian judicial source told Agence France-Presse that €150,000 was found in Ms Kaili’s flat, €600,000 in her partner’s home, and €750,000 in her father’s hotel room.’

(The partner’s already confessed.)

Finally some hard numbers. So how did the distributive reasoning go?

Mes petites. Men are powerfully compelled to be the protectors of women. They all sat there, gazing at 1.5 mill gleaming from suitcases on the coffee table in front of them, and her father said Give me most of it. I’ll hop a train asap for Athens. Her partner said You’re the public facing heavyweight my love; give me the rest of it. And she said I’ll just take a pinch for expenses.

December 18th, 2022
Beware of Greeks Bearing the Slightest Proximity to Gifts

Another one. Now that the Euro Parliament’s Greek VP has been arrested, expect all the other shady Greek MEPs to come rattling out of the can.

December 18th, 2022
Ick

On top of salary, MEPs can claim €9,500 a month in expenses and allowances without providing receipts. They may hold other paid jobs and need not publicly register contacts with agents of foreign states.

Parliament has resisted stronger accountability rules while built-in protections for internal whistleblowers are lacking...

[S]ome British MPS… say they followed UK parliamentary rules in accepting a total of £251,208 worth of gifts from Qatar in the year to October, including luxury hotels and business-class flights, while participating in “fact-finding” missions. Several spoke up for Qatar in subsequent debates. This may be legal. But how do they think it looks?

December 14th, 2022
FIFA, Qatar, Greece, and Italy.

These corruption hotspots have generated a corruption scandal, and the response of the Euro Parliament is “shock.”

We are “shocked.” SHOCKED. We are “reeling.”

Scusi, but UD doubts the EP’s shocked. Do they think that if you name your organization No Peace Without Justice, or No Impunity, that makes you a good person? These organizations (now known as No Justice Without a Piece of the Action, and No Punity) are simply names, and any set of values might in actuality be attached to them.

Do you know of any country that calls itself The Democratic Republic of that isn’t a tyranny? Do we really need to review these notes?

Similarly, we are supposed to be shocked because in this scandal all the greedy mfs are socialists?

I mean, let’s not be naive.

*********************************

While this scandal has rocked Brussels, the allegations have come as no great surprise to those who know the European institutions, especially the Parliament.

“The Parliament has tolerated a culture of impunity for years,” says Nicholas Aiossa, deputy director of Transparency International EU, an anti-corruption organization. “There is virtually no oversight or repercussions for the way that MEPs spend their allowances and we have seen those funds misused so many times.”

Aiossa believes that institutional corruption is only a small part of what would make an MEP such an inviting target for those seeking to influence European politics.

“The Parliament collectively has a lot of power over the direction of policy that provides access to an enormous market of over 400 million citizens. The MEPs themselves, however, often have a very low profile outside of the Brussels bubble, which probably helps avoid scrutiny.”

December 7th, 2022
Well, Kirk, Here’s something for you to learn “As You Grow.”

To cite the title of your book.

If the first thing people discover when they Google your name is that you’re homophobic, they’re probably not going to want you to hang out with their children. Got that?

January 6th, 2022
‘On November 9, 2020, [U. Chicago Professor Daniel] Catenacci received an email from Five Prime’s chief medical officer, … [notifying] him that [cancer drug] bemarituzamb passed its Phase 2 clinical trial and that U.S. securities law prohibited him from selling or buying stocks on the basis of this information, according to the charges. The following morning, Catenacci bought 8,743 shares of Five Prime’s stock. Five Prime publicly announced the results of the trial after the market closed that same day.’

LOL. Bad boy. Bad, bad, boy.

December 30th, 2021
“I can’t believe this needs to be said but the BBC should not give a platform to people accused of child sexual abuse.”

Everyone’s having a field day [‘BBC: Who Better To Break Down Ghislaine Maxwell Verdict Than… Guy Accused In The Same Matter?‘] now that the BBC has chosen to interview Harvard’s finest, of all people, about his buddy Ghislaine’s guilty verdict. (See post below this one.) Whodathunkit?

To be sure, Dershowitz fully exploited the big fat opportunity the BBC gifted him with to protest once again his own innocence in the child sexual abuse game. Yeah yeah tough titties ’bout Ghislaine but did you notice I’m still out of jail? See what a good boy I am? You wouldn’t put an eminent Harvard professor on trial for child sexual abuse, would you?

July 8th, 2020
“Once we get to 10 patients on this drug, we get a $100 gift certificate to a restaurant.”

Twenty-first century medicine.

January 29th, 2020
Mein Lieber Herr
Farewell mein Lieber herr
Goodbye mein Lieber herr
It was a fine affair but now it's over
And though we made you Chair
You're not allowed to share
We're better off without you mein herr

Your talent was a Thousand Talents wide mein herr
Your chemistry with China mesmerized mein herr
It's really no surprise to find you lied mein herr
But that's why
FBI
Watched you spy...

January 9th, 2020
Reddy or Not, Here They Come

They all go into the fraud,
The double dippers, the conflicted, the bogus guest speakers,
The whorish expert witnesses, the whorish corporate board sitters,
The twisters of research results to benefit their corporate masters,
The creators of bogus companies into which to deposit federal grant money,
They all go into the fraud…

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot. And as we enter a new decade, it’s good to remind ourselves just how rampant these and other forms of academic fraud are, especially in our medical, law, engineering, and business schools.

How rampant? So rampant that ProPublica has just released a helpful “reporting recipe,” a lengthy checklist of types of professorial corruption, and how you can discover/report them.

Double dipper Akhilesh Reddy, to take the latest instance, simply “did not notice” that two different universities were simultaneously paying him large salaries. And who can deny that overlooking large sources of funds from large institutions is something of which all of us are capable?

Sensing that this claim might not convince everyone, Reddy moved on to the what a tangled web we weave phase of his explanation.

The neurologist and researcher gave inconsistent statements about the money, claiming he only noticed the salary issue when he checked his account in February 2016, five months after starting at UCL, the tribunal heard… He said he thought the universities were “sharing his salary”, that there was an “overlap” in his salaries and also that he thought the large sum was just his salary from UCL... Prof Reddy said he thought “all necessary people were fully aware of the position.”

Before he could add that his dog ate his homework, the tribunal suspended him from medical practice. He has left England and moved to Pennsylvania, cuz there’s always another sucker.

November 15th, 2019
Giuliani Under Gas Attack.

In the immortal words of Rufus T Firefly:

Tell him to take a teaspoonful of bicarbonate baking soda and a half a glass of water.

August 8th, 2019
Shirley Ann Jackson, Ruth J. Simmons, Robert L. Barchi, Phyllis M. Wise, Victor Dzau…

… the list of university leaders settling their greedy asses on corporate boards and drawing big money from them for doing nothing (except cutting into their university time by going to Hawaii for corporate junkets) is very very long; and even though they keep getting caught failing to disclose their several, often conflicted, board seats, these people keep doing it cuz man you don’t know greed and how it can drive you! You can’t hope to understand!

The latest corporate board scandal comes out of already insanely scandal-plagued University of North Carolina system, with its fake classes and shit. Take a place that’s already in deep doodoo and drive it yet farther underground: This has been the mandate of new head guy William Roper, who jest can’t seem to ‘member all the boards – some of whom do business with his institution – on which he has settled his ass. The local lamestream media insists on sticking its nose into his affairs, looking at forms he’s failed to fill out, etc., etc., and he’s pissed – as pissed as Shirley Ann Jackson used to get when people called her out (she had her people call her critics racists). From the height of his ass-cooling dignity Roper has issued statement after statement and you know what? It’ll work. UNC has suffered few negative consequences because it’s a jock-sniffing academic joke; Roper will suffer few negative consequences for his greed and deceit. UNC is what it is and life – in all its glorious scumminess – goes on.

March 24th, 2019
Ubi est mea?

This was, you recall, Mike Royko’s famous proposed motto (Where’s Mine?) for the incredibly corrupt city of Chicago; it now clearly stands for the tragic city of Baltimore, whose already-hapless mayor has revealed not only her personal corruption, but – along the way – the corruption of the University of Maryland medical system board of trustees.

Tragicomic, really, since the latest confirmation of the link between urban collapse and systemic corruption comes from sales – make that non-sales – of children’s books the mayor wrote (maybe – maybe someone else wrote them for her), self-published, and then sold in bulk for permanent storage in a warehouse to the same UM med system on whose board of trustees she sat.

Nothing unusual about that arrangement, though — huge numbers of trustees were self-dealing through the hospital system. The head of the UMMS board of trustees is doing mucho harrumphing about “managed conflicts,” but the phrase managed conflict has about the same persuasiveness as the phrase managed massage in the mouth of Robert Kraft.

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